The Mysterious Death of Jane Austen
Guest Post from Author Lindsay Ashford
I’ve been writing mystery novels for more than a decade – for most of that time I was juggling a career as an author with a variety of part-time jobs and trying to bring up four children at the same time. It was quite a struggle and there were times when I felt like giving up. But if I’ve learned anything from my life as a writer it’s that you have to believe in yourself and keep going even when life kicks you. Writing has, at times, been a bit like therapy. No matter how bad things have been, I’ve been able to step into the fictional worlds I’ve created and lose myself for a few hours.
Until recently I was known for what they call in the publishing industry ‘gritty crime’ – stories about serial killers and the seamy side of life in British cities. But my latest novel is something quite different – a historical mystery about the untimely death of Jane Austen. The idea for the book came to me when I got a chance many writers would jump at: I was invited to go and live in the English village of Chawton, in a house once owned by the Jane Austen’s brother.
The house-move came about because my partner was offered a job in the Elizabethan mansion, Chawton House, now a library and study centre. It was just a stone’s throw from the cottage where Jane lived. I planned to start work on another contemporary crime novel but within a few weeks of settling in the village I’d abandoned the new book. Instead my head was stuck in old volumes of the Austen family letters. One morning a sentence Jane penned just a few months before she died jumped out at me. Describing the weeks of illness she had suffered, she wrote: ‘I am considerably better now and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour…’
As a writer of crime fiction I’ve learned quite a bit about forensic techniques, including the detection of poisons. What Jane had described sounded very similar to the effect of arsenic poisoning, which creates dark and light patches on the skin when taken in small doses over a long period of time. No one has ever been able to fully explain the symptoms she experienced in the period leading up to her death at the age of 41. Could she have been poisoned, I wondered?